TOW #21 - What The United States Has Fought For

During the late 19th century leading into the early 20th century, American imperialism was on a rise. The idea of American imperialism, caused one of the largest debates in American history; the anti-imperialists versus the pro-imperialists.  Although there was lots of tension, this showed the pure and true effects of democracy by allowing a multitude of different opinions to disperse in the nation.  This cartoon titled, “What The United States Fought For”, justifies the reasons for imperializing lands like the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Isthmus of Panama.  The artist of this cartoon is clearly on the side of pro-imperialism and geared toward an audience of pro-imperialists. The use of symbolism and parallelism is quite evident in an attempt to justify American Imperialism.

The symbolism is seen as the different lands being shown as people. Each person on the top is holding some sort of ‘baggage’ or weight that is holding them down. For example, the Philippines is holding a box titled Spanish oppression, and Hawaii is holding a sack that says industrial slavery, and so on. The use of symbolism in this sense creates a dramatic effect of change that America helped in doing so.  The change from a weak, suffering, and tired person to a business person, is clearly quite huge, which is able to be seen through this symbolism.

Parallelism is also huge in this political cartoon.  Social Darwinism was very popular during this time period of American Imperialism, which played a huge role in the history of the United States of America. On the bottom half of the cartoon it shows the final stage of the lands, through the help of America.  These people (symbolic of the specific land) are changed into strong, wealthy, and proud businessmen. This is direct parallelism to the idea of Social Darwinism in the sense that America thought that the only way to really survive was to become strong and wealth and quite literally “Captains of Industry”.  The push for “survival of the fittest” played a huge part in American imperialism, and to some, justified the actions that happened during imperialism.

In my opinion I believe that the artist successfully proved their point by laying out both a sophisticated and unique argument. Although, I disagree with pro-imperialists and would probably side with anti-imperialists, this does not alter my view on the artist's effective use of rhetorical strategies in order to prove a point.